I'll most likely start trying to upgrade to the 2.6.19 kernel before I go doing much configuration.
That will put me back to where I was (on the learning curve) before changing the motherboard and chip from the old P-4 machine this was running on.
Thanx for the help though, I'm just happy to see it do anything at the moment.

Could you tell me, how exactly did you manage to get test26.s working? Is your disk on the JMicron controller or are we now speaking of the default mobo controller? How are your BIOS settings for the controllers?
I've spent a lot of time solving this issue and it is not yet clear to me what I should have done to avoid trouble. Although the system now works with 2.6.19...

Yes my SATA drive is on the Jmicron controller, and BIOS was (and still is) set to include it at boot.
I don't have the exact settings in front of me right now, but from memory I think it was Jmicron "enabled" and setting options (for it) to "AHCI" the other two options were "BASIC" and "RAID" if I remember right.
Got LAN working just minutes ago also, once again the onboard ethernet controller was an un-solveable mess.
At least by me........
I will also try to compile the latest kernel, 2.6.2 is now the latest stable version - so I'm hoping to get the rest of the features on this system active and working as soon as I can manage it.
Good luck to ya'

Interesting. It didn't work for me (the same settings), though. Controller was recognised, but reported I/O error while communicating with disk...

The JMicron controllers have a driver included in the kernel as of 2.6.19+. Be advised that kernels 2.6.18.3 through 2.6.19.2 have a nasty bug that can and will cause corruption on EXT3 filesystems.

Support for the controller is in 2.6.18 using a simple command passed to the kernel at boot. See the following page for details (answer is at the bottom):

http://www.jmicron.com/Support_FAQ.html

The support for these devices is still rather unimpressive as testing the JMB36X with IDE hard drives results in a maximum negotiated transfer rate of ~30MB/ due to UDMA2 as the agreed communication method. Attempts to increase the DMA mode using hdparm are unsuccessful. It always reports back UDMA2 even though 'hdparm -i /dev/XXX' indicates that detected devices are capable of UMDA3 and above.

Here's a couple more things that come to mind KleB, I have the C/D drive hard jumpered as master as the only IDE device, that seems to help sort out confusion in BIOS, and being unaware of the possibility of Ext3 file coruption with the earlier kernels I suppose it was just luck that I chose reiserfs.
So far it still works.............
Post back when you get yours up, I'll be curious to here what you found.